Imported Rules - Folders don't work!

J

jkies00

Hello,

I'm using Outlook 2003. I created about 20 folders in my inbox for
various email lists, and set up rules to organize the email into their
appropriate folders on their arrival.

I'd like to export these rules, and distribute them to my team, to save
everyone some time. I can export the rules, no problem. The problem
is when i import them - the folders no longer work!

Once I set up all my folders and got my rules working, I exported the
rules to a file, and then deleted them from Outlook. I also deleted
all of the folders I set up as well. I wanted to walk through the
steps the same way someone on my team would have to when I distribute
the rules.

I set up new folders with the correct names, and then imported the
rules. The rules seemed to import correctly, they were all listed in
the Rules window just like they were before. When I clicked the 'OK'
button, I got thiserror:

"Some of your rules do not have all their options set. If you save your
rules, these rules with
missing options will be deactivated. Do you want to save your rules?"

I clicked the 'No' button, and this time the Rules window shows the
recently imported rules, but none of their folder attributes are set
anymore. To get them to work, I have to go through all the rules and
reselect the folders for them, even though the folders showed correctly
when first imported.

If I take a step back, export my rules, delete the ones in Outlook, but
don't delete the folders, the imported rules work just fine, no
problem.

Ideally, I want the people on my team to be able to import these rules,
and not have to modify anything. The rules should just work, as long
as people have named their folders correctly. What am I doing wrong?

~jeff
 
S

Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]

You're not doing anything wrong. Outlook just doesn't work the way you expect. The data store is hard coded into the rules, so each target folder needs to be reset when the rule is imported into a different data store.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers
 

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